Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

WATCH: Sessions Refuses To Answer Questions About Stephen Miller At Hearing

In the middle of a five-hour appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Jeff Sessions refused to answer questions about top White House aide Stephen Miller — his own former employee.

Miller, the president’s senior adviser for policy who joined the Trump campaign from Sessions’s Senate staff, wrote the first draft of the letter justifying the firing of then-FBI director James Comey. Sessions was asked by Rep. Pramila Jayapal if Miller had ever told him that he was working on such a letter.

“Mr. Miller is a high government official close to the president of the United States, and I’m not at liberty to reveal the nature of any conversations we may have had,” Sessions responded. He claimed that he was not invoking executive privilege, but “following the long-established policies of the Department of Justice.”

Jayapal tried to further enquire as to what grounds Sessions was refusing to answer her question when her time expired. After a testy exchange with Democratic Rep. David Cicilline over whether the committee had a right to force Sessions to answer the question, committee chair Rep. Bob Goodlatte ruled that Sessions was within his rights.

Administrations from both parties “have long stated their ability to not answer questions regarding communications at the highest level of our government,” Goodlatte said.

Miller is the highest-level administration official to be questioned by special counsel Robert Mueller’s team as part of their investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. Sessions has recused himself from overseeing Mueller because of his own past meetings with Russian officials, which he had previously denied in congressional testimony.

Contact Aiden Pink at [email protected] or on Twitter, @aidenpink

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.